A Wedding in Italy: A feel good summer holiday romance (From Italy with Love Book 2)

by Tilly Tennant

  ‘You’re settling in well,’ Shauna continued, ‘and you’ve impressed everyone with how hard you work and how on the ball you are. I realise that you’ve been desk-bound since you joined us properly, and that might be frustrating for you. Christmas is coming, so it’s pointless moving anything along now, but I thought after the break you might want to take on a client base of your own and go out to do viewings.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ Kate said, mustering a bright smile. ‘That would be great.’

  It will be great, she told herself sternly. It will be great, so just shut up and get on with it.

  If Kate had thought Signora Conti went overboard with food at any other time of the year, at Christmas she took it to a whole new level. Kate was quite sure she’d need to have her stomach pumped come Boxing Day evening, and Alessandro had laughed at her as she rolled around their sofa complaining about it. Christmas Eve kicked them off: fish and vegetables for giorno di magro, or eating lean, as Alessandro explained it, to save themselves for the main event the next day. But after the nine courses of fish, vegetables and pasta that his mother had prepared and cooked were done, Kate couldn’t see where on earth the lean bit came in, but she did think someone had a very strange notion of what it was to abstain from indulgence.

  Christmas Day had featured large amounts of turkey, which Alessandro said some families in Rome ate and some didn’t, but Signora Conti had got one especially for Kate, and the kindness of the gesture almost reduced Kate to tears. Signora Conti had hugged her, and then everyone else had hugged her, including Maria and her four children, at which point Kate really did start to cry, prompting them to hug her some more.

  The one low point was the arrival of Orazia on Boxing Day. Ostensibly coming to see how Maria was, she paid rather a lot of attention to Alessandro, going out of her way to laugh at his every joke, sit as close as she could possibly get and generally make Kate more paranoid than ever. But nobody else seemed fazed in the slightest, and even Alessandro laughed and joked with her as he would with any old friend. Kate just couldn’t work the woman out and she was fast becoming convinced that the problem was all with her and not Orazia at all. Perhaps it was entirely down to high spirits and large amounts of wine, but if everyone else was happy to have her around and didn’t see any danger, why did Kate need to feel so nervous? As was her way, Signora Conti graciously extended her hospitality to Orazia and insisted she stay as long as she liked, and so the wasp in Kate’s gelato stayed for dinner and late into the evening as well. The one blessing was that she barely paid Kate any heed at all – at least not until the conversation turned to Kate’s job.

  ‘You have work now?’ Orazia said, smiling. Kate suspected that her having a job was no surprise to Orazia, who usually made it her business to find out everything that Kate was up to. ‘That is very good.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Kate offered as a neutral reply.

  ‘Soon she will be the boss!’ a drunken Lucetta cried, waving her fork in the air.

  ‘We are very proud of her,’ Alessandro said, shooting a fond glance at Kate. ‘She will be able to stay in Rome now that she has work.’

  From the corner of her eye, Kate noted Orazia’s demeanour change in an instant. It was subtle enough, and perhaps anyone not paying as much attention would have missed it, but Kate didn’t.

  ‘That is good,’ Orazia said, ramming a forkful of pasta into her mouth and chewing as if she was eating tree bark.

  ‘It is more than good,’ Alessandro said. ‘It is the most wonderful news.’

  ‘It pays well?’ Orazia asked.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Kate said.

  ‘It will pay well soon,’ Alessandro said. ‘Kate will sell plenty houses and she will make enough to buy a nicer apartment than the one she rents from Salvatore.’

  Kate waved the praise away. ‘I don’t think that’ll happen any time soon.’

  ‘You are clever,’ Lucetta said. ‘You make the worst of life good. And if you do not sell lots of houses you will sell many dresses and you will be rich.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ Kate replied, shooting a cautious glance at Orazia, whose expression was unreadable. But she saw a flicker of emotion as Maria spoke, though she couldn’t quite work out what it was.

  ‘I admire your strength,’ Maria said earnestly. Kate turned to her, aware she was staring but unable to help it. ‘You come to Rome with nothing and you make a home. You have great sadness in your life and you make it happy. That is strong. I wish I was strong like that. . .’ Her voice wobbled, and Abelie leapt up to throw an arm around her while Kate felt the heat spread to her face. What had just happened? Was that a compliment from the stony-hearted Maria?

  ‘Maria is right,’ Alessandro said, beaming with pride at Kate. ‘We are all happy you have come to Rome.’

  Kate forced a smile for Alessandro as he leaned in to kiss her lightly. But her gaze was drawn to Orazia, who was now concentrating a bit too hard on the plate in front of her and holding her fork in a grip that suggested she was anything but relaxed. Kate tried not to dwell on it. While she didn’t want to see trouble around every corner, that didn’t mean it wasn’t there, just the same.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Her stomach needed to behave. After a brief morning meeting at their favourite coffee shop, a quick trip back to the office to gen up on the particulars of her first visit and collect any paperwork she might need, Kate found herself in a car borrowed from Shauna and out on the roads, driving in Italy for the first time since she’d arrived. Not the best, perhaps, but a competent enough driver at home, even on the sometimes complicated one-way systems of Manchester, this was a whole new level of scary. She was desperately wishing she’d chosen a better moment to take her first solo trip, but as she hadn’t needed to drive before, she’d kept putting it off. Now she was reaping the rewards of that decision. Not only was she coping with the steering wheel and gears being very unhelpfully on the wrong side of the car, and having to remember to stay on the right side of the road, but just about every other driver in Rome seemed determined to get in her way. Horns sounded so often that she couldn’t tell whether they were directed at her, at someone else or just for the hell of it. In the corners of her vision, cars flashed by so close to hers that she could see in crisp detail the gashes and scrapes down their bodywork (which almost all seemed to have) and what made things even worse was the knowledge that this wasn’t her car to trash, though trashing did seem to be the inevitable fate of it, no matter how hard she tried to stay out of everyone’s way. The road signs didn’t help, nor did the fact that she had no idea where she was going and the satnav Shauna had set up for her had decided it would rather be doing something else and had stopped making sense almost as soon as she’d left the office. Even time itself seemed out to get her, and the clock on the dashboard mocked her as the minutes raced towards the appointment slot – unlike her car, which seemed to be racing around and around in circles, caught up in the speedway track that was otherwise known as Rome’s highways. She’d wanted to arrive early, and had set out in plenty of time to be there, cool and calm before her client arrived. At this rate, the client was going to be placing a very angry call to the office to demand an explanation for where she was.

  Half an hour later, her blouse damp with perspiration and her heart beating at twice its normal rate, she pulled up outside a cream-stone frontage. It contained the rather small, averagely priced apartment that was Kate’s first solo outing as an actual estate agent. The street outside was empty, and although Kate herself was a couple of minutes late, she had to assume that the prospective buyer was late too.

  ‘Thank you,’ she mouthed to the heavens as she clambered from the car and clicked the fob to lock it. Taking a deep breath and a moment to straighten herself out, she fished in her bag for the apartment keys. But she stopped at the doors, hesitant. Shauna always liked to get there early and give the property a cursory once-over so there would be no nasty surprises when the buyers were shown around. But if Kate d
id that now, she ran the risk of not being there to greet them outside the building when they arrived.

  Eventually, she decided to wait.

  She waited.

  And waited some more.

  Kate glanced at her watch. Ten minutes had passed. It wasn’t so late, considering the trouble she’d had getting there, and perhaps the client was stuck in traffic or lost too. She was just about to call the office to see if they knew anything when her own phone started to ring.

  ‘Kate.’ Shauna’s tone was uncharacteristically abrupt at the other end of the line. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m at Via di San Francesco. That’s where I’m supposed to be, isn’t it?’ she added, her stomach suddenly lurching at the thought she might have made a mistake.

  ‘If you’re there, how come the client is phoning me telling me you’re not?’

  ‘They are? But I’m standing outside the building and there’s nobody here. In fact, the road is pretty much empty so they’re not anywhere nearby.’

  ‘Well, they’re telling me they’re there and you’re not, so you’d better go and look for them.’

  ‘I will, I’m—’

  The apology on Kate’s lips was cut short by Shauna slamming down the phone.

  ‘Great job, Kate,’ she muttered as she scanned the street once again, though quite where she was expecting her client to leap out from was a mystery. There was definitely nobody else here. With no clue of what else to do, she rattled the huge iron key in the lock of the main doors and let herself into the building. If she’d had to unlock the door, then she didn’t really see how her keyless buyer could be in there, but she couldn’t think where else to look and standing on the front steps like a prune wasn’t going to find them.

  The apartment was on the second floor. Rather than wait for the cranky old lift, Kate dashed up the stairs. At the top, she glanced along the landing to see a statuesque blonde leaning on the wall outside the apartment she was meant to be showing. Her prospective buyer, she presumed, though Kate didn’t have a clue how she’d got into the building.

  ‘Miss Collins?’ she asked uncertainly. The woman turned to her, gave her a cursory glance up and down and then nodded.

  ‘I thought the appointment was for eleven.’

  ‘It is. I was here,’ Kate said, trying not to be flustered by the woman’s manner. She couldn’t be more than twenty, but she was tall and attractive, with a posh accent, immaculate clothes and make-up. This was an apartment at the cheaper end of the property ladder, but Kate was still taken by vague surprise that such a young woman could afford it, and by the way Miss Collins spoke to her. ‘I was outside waiting. I’d assumed you wouldn’t be able to access the building without me so I wasn’t expecting to find you in here.’

  At this the woman’s attitude seemed to soften. ‘One of the residents was coming in and when I told them I might be buying here they asked if I wanted to get a look inside.’ She shrugged. ‘And you weren’t here so I thought, what the hell?’

  Helpful, Kate thought. Bloody brilliant. She wanted to mention how helpful calling the office to drop her in it had been too, but perhaps that would be pushing it. ‘I’m sorry you’ve had to wait,’ she said instead. ‘Pesky misunderstanding but I’m here now, so we can go into the apartment if you like.’

  As the front door opened, a mouse scurried across the floor. Kate’s groan was audible, and there was no point trying to hide it because there was no way her client had failed to see it too.

  ‘I think it’s been empty for a while,’ Kate offered by way of a lame explanation.

  ‘I think it’s in need of pest control,’ Miss Collins said crisply, stepping over the threshold.

  The curtains were closed, and Kate almost wondered whether it would be better to leave the place in gloom, dreading what else the daylight might show up. But she crossed the room and threw them open anyway, a cloud of dust issuing forth as she did and revealing a scattering of bluebottle corpses along the windowsill. Next time she did a viewing, she was going to get there an hour before with some cleaning supplies to make sure the place was spotless, because this was simply embarrassing. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have sworn that this was some kind of induction prank pulled by her colleagues to welcome the newbie.

  ‘I take it you haven’t been able to sell this place,’ Miss Collins asked with a grimace as she took in the room. ‘No wonder it wasn’t on the website. Next time one of your office monkeys “recommends” a place in my price range, I might think twice about trusting their recommendation.’

  Kate tried not to scowl. So it needed a good clean and a lick of paint – perhaps some sturdy body armour to protect from the bugs and rodents. It had been empty for a while, but then many properties had and, if nobody was going in, how could it be pristine? What was this girl expecting?

  ‘I know it’s hard to see past the grime, but you must remember that we’re in a prime location here,’ she said. The sale had already gone, so what was the point in pussyfooting around? ‘This is Rome, after all, and you’re going to spend a lot of money on a shed here. This apartment is catering for a more modest budget. If you want to look at something more expensive, we have other properties on our books that require no work at all to move in.’

  ‘This is in my budget,’ the girl said quickly, her arrogance suddenly gone.

  ‘And I suppose there wasn’t a lot else on our books?’ Kate replied. ‘I’ve only recently moved to Rome myself, and I know exactly how hard it is to find a good property on a budget. May I enquire why you’re buying and not renting?’

  ‘It was meant to be an investment,’ she said. ‘My Italian grandmother recently died, and she left me some money, on the proviso that I maintain some link with Italy. So I thought it seemed like a good idea to buy a place here. My boyfriend reckoned I’d make a killing renting it out as a holiday let. I had wondered whether I might even live in it myself, but looking around now, I guess I overestimated what my money would buy me.’

  ‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ Kate said. ‘My apartment was way worse than this when I moved in, but it’s quite cosy now and it didn’t take as much work as you’d think. If you let me show you around, I can give you lots of cheap ideas about what you could do in here, and maybe you would be tempted to move in yourself, but at the very least you’d have something good to rent out. There are a lot worse places to be in the world than here and people like me, who are just starting out, would snap your hand off to take a flat in this neighbourhood. It’s a bit out of the centre for most holidaymakers, perhaps, if I’m being completely honest with you, but then again, some like that because it’s more peaceful at night. I think either way, even if you didn’t make a killing, you’d make enough to cover your initial outlay and some to put away for a rainy day, and when you come to sell on – if you can ever bear to sell on – you should make a tidy profit for the effort you’ve put into making the place habitable.’

  Miss Collins blinked at her. And then nodded. ‘Thanks. Um. . . sorry, what was your name?’

  ‘Kate.’

  ‘I’m Verity.’

  Kate extended her hand, a subconscious signal that they should start their meeting again on a better footing, and Verity shook. ‘Pleased to meet you, Verity,’ she said and smiled. ‘So, shall we go and see if we can find out just how many mice you might need to collect rent from if you do buy this place?’

  ‘It’s impressive,’ Charles said carelessly. At least, it sounded a bit like that, but the mouthful of boiled sweets he was talking through made it difficult for Kate to understand.

  ‘It is,’ Elizabeth agreed, sans the chomping and, therefore, much easier to understand. ‘Nonna hasn’t been able to get anyone to look at that place for months, but the first person you get through the door puts an offer in. What kind of bribes did you have to employ?’

  ‘We just chatted about what she wanted, and the possibilities for the place, and eventually she saw it the way I did. I just said what I thought, really.’<
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  ‘Wow, who knew giving your honest opinion actually worked,’ Charles said, staring down at his phone. ‘That’s a new one.’

  ‘We don’t lie,’ Shauna scolded.

  ‘No, but we sometimes keep the truth to ourselves,’ Charles replied, rooting in the bag on his desk for another sweet.

  ‘That’s just you,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Some of us have morals.’

  ‘It’s just you with the morals, which is why you barely sell anything,’ Charles said.

  Elizabeth’s brow creased, but then she smoothed her face into a smile for Kate. ‘I think it’s brilliant. Well done to you. Do you feel like a real estate agent now?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Kate said. ‘But I do feel slightly less useless than I did at nine this morning.’

  ‘In that case,’ Shauna said, making her way over to Kate’s desk and dropping a sheaf of paperwork onto it, ‘there’s a couple of nice viewings tomorrow if you fancy having a crack at them. No pressure, but if you can work some more of whatever magic you worked today, you and I will be getting along famously.’

  Kate glanced around the office, where her colleagues eyed her keenly, apart from Charles, who was doing his best to appear disinterested as he fiddled with his phone. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘I’ll do my best.’

  Charles let out a yawn as he reached for another handful of sweets. ‘Let’s see how far your beginner’s luck will stretch,’ he said before stuffing them in.

  There were no more instant sales, but the week went as well as Kate could have hoped for. Driving around the city became slightly less terrifying, though still scary enough for the danger of a stomach ulcer from the constant stress to be a distinct one, but she’d mastered the satnav, and the art of arriving at her destination in plenty of time to make sure she knew what was coming when she opened the front door of the property. So far it had been simple viewings for prospective buyers, but Friday came, and Shauna took her to one side.